Join us at Laurier

Becoming a Golden Hawk means more than just cheering on our (really good) varsity teams – it means being a student who cares about your community, who works hard in the classroom, and who takes advantage of all the learning opportunities that can happen outside the classroom, too.

Dr. Sebastian P. L. Fourné

Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change (Initiation and Implementation)

Ambidexterity, Exploration, Innovation

Family Firms, Start-ups, Internationalization

Biography / Academic Background

Sebastian Fourné obtained his PhD at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University, in 2014. He was a visiting PhD Candidate at INSEAD in Singapore. Sebastian currently is visiting scholar at Erasmus University Rotterdam and at Singapore Management University.

He obtained his MSc in Strategic Management 'Cum Laude' and his BSc in International Business Administration 'Cum Laude' at RSM and completed an exchange at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sebastian is also a professional golfer, an expert skier, a modestly talented tennis player, and overall a sports fan.

Research Interests / Ongoing Projects

Sebastian is intrigued by the notion that most organizations tend to focus on existing businesses and clients, and are not able to break away from existing routines and processes in order to explore new business models and markets.

To what extent are existing firms able to facilitate the emergence of entrepreneurship within their organization and, even more difficult, balance this desire of innovation and change with a continued focus on operational excellence?

In this quest, Sebastian is interested in the strategic leadership roles as well as relationships of top and middle managers, in how they conjointly facilitate organizational change.

Sebastian's second research stream focuses on family-owned firms' and start-ups' internationalization - especially drivers of increasing commitment to foreign markets over time.

Awards and Achievements

Sebastian is an award winning author (e.g., the 2017 AOM IM Division's CEIBS Best Paper Award recipient and a John Wiley & Sons high impact author) and a prized reviewer. His research has been published in the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, California Management Review, Human Resource Management, Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Management Studies, and Small Business Economics.

Selected Publications

Arndt, F. F., Fourné, S. P. L., & MacInerney, K. 2018. The Merits of Playing It by the Book: Routine versus Deliberate Learning and the Development of Dynamic Capabilities, Industrial and Corporate Change, doi: 10.1093/icc/dty005.